Early Modern Notes

Claire at Early Modern Material Culture is hosting the 3rd early modern blog carnival next week. I’m not sure what her blogging email is but you can also send submissions to me at sharon AT earlymodernweb DOT org DOT uk and I’ll pass them on.

If you’re new around here, check out the carnival homepage for links to the first two issues and to other blog carnivals for examples. The idea is to gather together a showcase of good blog writing on the subject – anything in the period c.1500-1800 (or slightly before/after) – since the last carnival in early November. They do not have to be very long or ‘scholarly’, but they should contain some historical discussion (or at least comment) – ie, not just lists of links or republished quotes. You can nominate your own work and/or that of others, but no more than one post per blog, please.

Update: Claire’s email is chlgeorge AT hotmail DOT com (replace AT with @ and DOT with . , in case you weren’t sure…)

Plus, while I’m thinking of it, would anyone like to volunteer to host the next carnival in early March?

What they said, really.

It’s hard to know what I feel right now. Anyone who lives by the sea for a while learns something of its dangers, its potential for all too sudden death and destruction; but not on this scale.

Not like this.

Just help if you can: here are some links for the purpose. There will be many more out there.

.

Back home after a great week’s holiday…

Immediate tasks (not New Year resolutions because I don’t do that kind of shite): Must clean out flat before the end of 2004. And get on with work. (Too many January deadlines…) Then some blogging, but not properly till next week.

Christmas tallies

Hangovers: 2. Different kinds of alcohol consumed: 7, I think, including the sip of aniseed-flavoured stuff that I didn’t like (and counting fizzy wine separately from the other kinds). Too much gin. Gin is bad, bad, bad. And this tastes like alcoholic Mini Milk lollipops. Wowee.

Calories: Who knows? Who cares?

Movies: 5 (very light – and rather random – viewing this year): The Wicked Lady (DVD); Victor/Victoria; What’s Up Doc?; Mouse Hunt; at the cinema: The Incredibles ( fantastic! go see!)

Shopping: shamefully self indulgent, and mostly very pink (wanna see my pink boots?).

I’m taking several days off blogging now. I’ll be spending a good part of Christmas with friends eating too much and drinking even more (and although they have internet access, I have come to the conclusion that alcohol + blogging = unwise in the extreme). But in any case I think I should take a blog holiday, after six months near-continuous posting. So I probably won’t be back much before the New Year (maybe the occasional brief silliness or photos if I get severe withdrawal symptoms).

There are certain things that I planned to blog by now that haven’t happened: the second part of the ‘how to get funding’ post, and roundups of links for South America and the Middle East. They’ll just have to wait till January. I may have a go at those Lollards when I get back too. And high time there were more DNB posts! (I’m up for New Year biography requests…)

But, anyway, let me leave you with a few links for the holiday season, and wish you all the best whatever your faith and preferred festivities.

Nadolig Llawen!

Winter festivals and traditions
Winter festivals
Origins of mid-winter festivals
Winter festivals/festivals of light

Names of the Christmas festivals
Eleven Christmas customs (sepoy, this has a section on Christmas trees!… But no, I don’t know why you dragged a 7 foot tree into your living room. Where I celebrate Christmas this would be regarded as an absurd distraction from eating and drinking)
Wikipedia Christmas
Winter solstice and Christmas
History of Hogmanay
A Scottish Hogmanay
A Victorian Christmas

Early Modern Christmases and Controversies
Cotton Mather’s dilemma: Christmas in Puritan New England
Feast, fairs and festivals: mirrors of Renaissance society
Christmas unwrapped
Christmas witchcraft in 17th-century Finnmark
Notes on seventeenth-century English Christmases
Christmas in and out (by John Taylor, the ‘water poet’)
The ascetic and the skeptical

Chanukah Wikipedia
Chanukah
History of Chanukah
History of Hanukkah

The official Kwanzaa website
Everything about Kwanzaa
Kwanzaa Information Centre

Saturnalia
Saturnalia Special
Saturnalia Convivia
Celebrating Solstice
Ancient origins: Yule
History of the yule log
Midvinterblot
Wassailing
Iroquois Midwinter Dream Festival

And… Let the Christmas/holiday blogging commence (maybe I will come back and add to this section!)

Hark the Herald Tribune Sings
Seize to exist, or a short hiatus

(Of course, the Chanukah/Hanukkah already started earlier in the month…)
And for the Victories
Eighth Candle (follow links in sidebar to the rest of the Candles)

Of course, what I’m really waiting for is Belle’s Christmas feasting post(s).

We’ll probably all be doing this in the next few days: Look, my blog’s on Amazon!

(As is the main site.)

Thanks to Clancy and Chuck

(Request from Chris Williams: “Levellers, diggers, ranters, quakers, antinomians, socinians, fifth monarchy men and baptists, please. Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, Winstanley, Coppe . . . even Thomas Tany. Possibly.” So let’s see how far we can get…)

For a list of more general Civil Wars/Revolution related links, go to EMR: Politics, rebellions, revolutions

The English Revolution
Civil Wars of Ideas
The World Turned Upside Down
British Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate 1638-1660
English dissenters (Adamites, Anabaptists, Baptists, Barrowists, Behmenists, Brownists, Diggers, Familists, Fifth Monarchists, Free-will Men, Grindletonians, Jacobites, Levellers, Lollards, Muggletonians, Puritans, Quakers, Ranters, Sabbatarians, Seekers, Socinians. I could almost stop right here…)
Writing, radicalism and the dominant culture

THe Putney debates
Radical women during the English Revolution
The Solemn League and Covenant

An Agreement of the People
The Levellers: Libertarian Radicalism and the English Civil War
The Levellers: chronology and bibliography
Statement of the Levellers
The Just Defence of John Lilburne
Selected works of the Levellers (John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, Richard Overton)
Levellers and Diggers reading list

Winstanley (1975)
The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced
The English Diggers 1649-50
Gerard Winstanley: 17th-century communist
The religion of Gerrard Winstanley
Digger writings
Winstanley and the Diggers 1649-1999 (book review)

“A fiery flying roll”, Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters
Ranters run amok (book review)

The Antinomians and Blake
Antinomians redeemed
Revising Anne: histories of Hutchinson and the Antinomians

Autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton (review)

Quaker online texts
George Fox’s autobiography
Quaker women

Baptist Confessions of Faith
Gender and ecclesiology amongst early English Baptists
Baptists historical relation to the Protestant reformation
Early English Baptists
Influence of Calvinism on seventeenth-century English Baptists
Baptists and religious liberty in early Connecticut

The sixteenth-century apocalypse: the Fifth Monarchists (title notwithstanding, seems to refer to the 17th century…)
Fifth Monarchy Men guide

Milton Reading Room
Milton-L homepage
Selected political works of Milton

….

Not much luck with Thomas Tany though (beyond passing mentions).

NB: Caveat Lector (note on links)

It struck me that I’ve never spelt out here certain things about my links ‘policy’ that I do make clear on the main site:

I have not intensively or extensively evaluated the sites; their inclusion here is not a guarantee of quality or historical accuracy. All the usual cautions concerning the use of online materials (or any other information source, for that matter) should be applied. (Try this particularly useful Guide to Evaluating Internet Information).*

The fact that I link to a webpage or website does not mean that I have ‘approved’ it. The strategy for links posts here does tend to be a little bit more selective than when I’m bookmarking things for EMR, if only because I’m usually looking for specific topics. And I do ignore web pages that immediately strike me as crass, fatuous, ignorant, too superficial (or simply repeat other pages – all those identical online encyclopaedias!). But I don’t spend long making those judgments, and I’m rarely expert enough to judge the accuracy of fine points of detail or historiographical interpretation. So it’s up to you, the reader, to ensure that anything you visit from here and want to use is fit for your purposes. I realise that most of you probably already knew this: it just seemed worth spelling out clearly in case anyone was unsure.

(Also, I don’t want to set this out at length in every links post, so in part this little post is intended as something I can simply link to as a standard disclaimer in the future.)

For further information on evaluating web resources, check this page.

…………………

* Except, I’ve just remembered, that particular link is broken following yet another of those site re-organisations – and this isn’t the first time I’ve had to change the URL for this article, I think. (‘Stability’ is in itself regarded by some as an important issue in evaluating the quality of an educational internet resource…) Anyway, it should be: http://www.library.jhu.edu/researchhelp/general/evaluating/

(From sepoy, who was especially interested in the foundation of the company, aka the ‘John Company’. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be too much detailed material about the early years out there…so I’ve listed what I can find along with more general sites and ones that go into the 18th and 19th centuries for the rest of you.)

General outlines/overviews
Wikipedia entry
Outline
The East India Company
English East India Company
400 years of the East India Company
Timeline

More detail
The British presence in India in the 18th century
Trading Places: the East India company and Asia 1600-1834 (there is a page on the foundation of the company.
Whitewashing the past (criticises the BL exhibition)
Trading Places an online course accompanying the BL exhibition (Beginnings)
The trading world of Asia and the English East India Company 1660-1760 (book review)
Transformation from a pre-colonial to a colonial order
John Company and Tea’s arrival in England
Beginning eastward from London: establishment of the British East India Company 1599-1660
Svadesh Videsh: home from home (late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)

Further reading
Bibliography on East India Company and India Office records
Harriet Martineau and the India Question bibliography
East India trade bibliography

Useful comparisons
The East India Companies
The Dutch East India Company
Dutch East India Company (wikipedia)
Dutch East India Company archives
The Danish East India company
The digital archive of the Swedish East India Company 1731-1813

NB:
Caveat Lector (note on links)

I made me a Favicon. It’s currently coming up in Firefox (sort of), but not in IE (scratches head puzzledly).

(If you can see an ‘E’ next to the URL in the address bar and in your favorites/bookmarks list, it’s working for you too. Cute, eh? I’ve wanted one of these for ages but didn’t know what they were called…)

Quick Update: Ah. To make it work properly it seems you may need to delete your existing bookmark and re-bookmark the page, then click on the new bookmark. (And if you have it in a Firefox tab the same might apply.) If you think it’s worth the trouble of course. I mean, it’s not that exciting, except to me.

I came across this comment at Historiological Notes, made by a certain Sharon on 16 June.

I’m contemplating starting a blog to go with my Early Modern Resources site (www.earlymodernweb.org.uk) – perhaps mainly for adding new links so that they don’t simply get lost in my bookmarks files before they can be put on the website proper, perhaps something more than that. I don’t know if I have time to become a serious blogger! I like varied blogs, by the way. And ones that generate interesting discussions without taking themselves too seriously all the time…

There should be a warning on Blogger (just after the bit where it says: set up a blog in 5 minutes, it’s really easy!): BLOGGING IS ADDICTIVE. IT WILL SUCK YOU IN. YOU WILL NEVER ESCAPE.

Scrolled down a bit further. Sharon added on 26 June:

Update: I went ahead and made the blog: http://www.earlymodernweb.blogspot.com/

And it’s cool, really cool. (Except that I now have to learn to ration the time I give it so that I GET SOME WORK DONE.) I can do all sorts of news-type stuff for early modernists that I couldn’t put on my web site because I didn’t have time to update it every week; I can have a good rant (or a laff); I can try out bits of writing… though I don’t know yet how much of it will be serious or historiographical. That takes some brain work, after all. :~) But I would like it to be a good history-focused blog rather than personal ramblings. (Don’t get me wrong, there are many ‘personal’ blogs that I like a lot, and all good blogs should be personalised. That’s part of the appeal.) Without getting too pompous, I want to lead by example here. (Yeah, that was still a bit pompous, wasn’t it?)

I’m just amazed at all the possibilities that keep opening up. … But it probably will take time to get the word out more widely. I previously saw blogs as really just personal/political diaries, not ‘real’ academic tools – and I’ve been championing the internet for historians for over 4 years!

The post and the subsequent discussion is worth re-reading, by the way. Interesting (well, to me) how my blogging ‘philosophy’ was substantially in place within 10 days of opening for business. And, in a way, my personal answer to the discussions of academic women blogging: don’t just talk about it, do it. Show that it can be done, for anyone (female or male) worrying over whether to try, and how. Make it as good as you can. Express opinions (and be prepared to defend them). Have fun in the process.

It never occurred to me to blog pseudonymously or about my personal life. In any case, I still wouldn’t know what to say, except sometimes about cooking, if that counts as personal (I’m deeply jealous of the personal bloggers who have interesting lives to write about!), whereas I think that doing history is fascinating enough to write about whether anybody reads it or not. This blog was always going to be an extension to my existing online presence, which was ‘professional’ (as an academic resource site) and named from the beginning. So, anyway, it just never occurred to me, either, that there might be anything to worry about in doing it that way, as a woman, or as a starting-out academic, or any other of the many social categories to which I might belong.

Recently, profgrrl asked her readers a set of questions about why and how they blog (or don’t, even). A lot of people responded (though I forgot, I think…). We’re a garrulous lot by definition really: it isn’t hard to get us to open up and talk about why we do this, so I wish more people would actually do stuff like that before they start proposing grand unified theories of gender and blogging. So that’s my recommended post for weekend reading. And feel welcome to add your thoughts here.

Obviously, I’m not really a female blogger at all, am I? Have I been faking it all this time? Do you want your money back?

I find these ‘why don’t more women in academia blog’ conversations more dispiriting every time they come around, since a) they’re full of (well-meaning, on the whole) people making generalisations without benefit of, er, evidence; b) they always degenerate into stupid in-fighting. And c) they make me personally feel a bit of a freak because I don’t recognise myself in the pictures of female academic bloggers that are drawn. (Well, except for my little shoe fetish, I suppose.)

Actually, although I linked to the CT post above, I don’t know whether I’d actually recommend reading it unless you really don’t have anything better to do with your time over the weekend.

(With a quick wave to the Little Professor!)

Jonathan at Head Heeb reports that The Old Bailey Proceedings Online is complete: the database now contains over 100,000 trials, from April 1674 to October 1834. (Jonathan also has more for us about the London Jewish community in the early nineteenth century.)

There are more new features: a mapping feature for trials 1714-1759 and a search for associated manuscript papers and Ordinary’s Accounts for the period 1746-1755. The Ordinary’s Accounts are in themselves a remarkable source and it’s fantastic to see them going online.

The Manuscript papers include pre-trial examinations before magistrates and coroners, lawyers’ case notes, petitions and pardons. Meanwhile, the Ordinary of Newgate was the prison chaplain, whose duty it was to provide spiritual care to prisoners condemned to death. He also had the right to publish the prisoner’s final confession and ‘criminal biography’, and it’s this series of publications (which were very profitable) that’s known as the Ordinary’s Accounts.

The availability of these associated sources will greatly enrich the (already rich!) resource of the Proceedings. We historians of early modern crime under English law can’t often follow criminal cases through from their beginnings to the trial and beyond, or learn very much about the backgrounds (although the Ordinary’s Account, as heavily moralising biography, needs some caution, of course) of offenders. I have some quite rich pre-trial records from my parts of Wales, but I know next to nothing about what transpired in court except the bald official record of indictment, verdict and sentence (which is recorded in the future tense – ‘to be hanged’, ‘to be whipped’; it’s not always easy to be sure whether or not a sentence was actually carried out). Many historians have only those formal trial records to work with; the pre-trial documents were not part of the official legal record and were very often destroyed after trials. Only London (and to a lesser extent Surrey) had the commercial market to sustain a series of detailed print accounts of trials, and finding archival manuscript sources that relate to the trial reports is not necessarily straightforward (many courts’ files are poorly indexed if at all, different courts’ archives could end up in different places, and magistrates’ and lawyers’ papers elsewhere again, some survived better than others…).

It’ll be marvellous if this part of the website is extended in the future, but I don’t know if there’s likely to be the funding for it. I see that there are plans to seek further funding to put online the successor to the OBP (the Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court) through to the early twentieth century…

On Wednesday, I realised that it was months since I’d done one of my favourites: chilli con carne. (I’m not going to give recipe links; this is a standard with hundreds of slightly varying recipes, and in the end, you never follow any of them exactly anyway.) So I trotted off to the foodie shop for a 1lb pack of organic beef mince. (And the onions and tinned tomatoes and veg and stuff.)

Does anyone out there actually use dried kidney beans? I always end up getting them from a tin (once I’ve decided I want chilli, waiting till next day for beans to soak overnight is so not going to happen…), although it’s more expensive that way. And I use chilli sauce and cayenne pepper rather than fresh chillies too (easier to control the heat).

And as you’ll have noticed, that was a big pot of meaty stuff for one girl. So this is what happened to the leftovers: two tubs for the freezer, one small tub for the fridge. That was meant to go with a baked potato yesterday, but I forgot to put the potato in the oven until it was far too late… so in the end it made a soup with extra potatoes and peas and chunks of granary bread.

That’s quite enough red meat for a few days. But I haven’t quite decided what I’ll do with my baked potato tonight. (Following some very serious thought, I think just creamy goats cheese and a tomato salad should be nice.)

….

PS: a question to those who know these things. Don’t alt tags work in Firefox? Or does it need to be coded slightly differently? I’ve just noticed that none of the images here are showing the alt text, but it’s fine in IE…

It’s astounding to stop and think about it: I’ve been blogging at EMN for six months today. (There were one or two earlier posts at Claire’s aborted group blog.) I moved to this WordPress-powered site from Blogger at the end of July. (Lovely WordPress. You are my friend. Though an upgrade to 1.3 is on the cards before too long.)

That means about 370 posts including the original Blogger site and well over 600 comments on this one alone (there aren’t many at Blogger and besides it doesn’t seem possible to count them without scrolling through the entire blog, so I can’t be bothered).

(What exactly did I do to waste time before? Oh, I remember. Google. Trash fiction. Well, that hasn’t changed so much then.)

It’s astounding because on the one hand I don’t know where the last six months has gone, and on the other it feels as though I’ve been doing this forever. Six months is a long time in the blogosphere, isn’t it? And long enough to gather plenty of debts: I’m still pathetically grateful to Claire for sending me the email that got all this started back in about April or May; to Ralph Luker (Cliopatria) for always being so encouraging (even when teasing me for my ignorance of American historians’ scandals); to Harrison (All Day Permanent Red) for the techie WP advice; everybody who has ever left a comment here and helped to make it such fun (special mention, I think, to my fellow criminal justice nerds Jonathan Edelstein (Head Heeb) and Chris Williams (who still doesn’t have a blog)); and if that leaves any individuals who should have got a credit that I’ve forgotten, apologies.

I now have blogging privileges at two group blogs, The Dictionary of Received Ideas and Cliopatria (although I’m not exactly the most diligent of Cliopatriarchs; I keep expecting to be thrown out on my arse for my general idleness in that quarter).

And beyond the blogosphere? For a start, I couldn’t not mention the lovely lunch with Natalie (Philobiblon) back in ?October (here’s to more future bloggers’ lunches!). And it’s bringing some lovely new academic contacts and friends. Besides, there’s the whole sense of imagined community from feeling that you’re in on something that’s still new and fresh, experimental and dynamic. (Of course it’s not perfect; there are arguments and anxieties, it can be divisive and cliquey. What the hell do you expect? Academics are people with strong opinions and their own prejudices and blind spots, not bleedin’ angels.)

OK. I want to finish with some nods to my favourite bloggers of the past six months.

For making me laugh till I wet myself on a regular basis: One Good Thing; Manolo’s Shoe Blog (and, hey, shoes!).

For being so breath-takingly beautiful: Giornale Nuovo; Hoarded Ordinaries

For keeping me in touch with the world: Head Heeb

For simply being there: All Day Permanent Red; Bitch PhD; Frogs and Ravens; Playing School; scribblingwoman; Siris; wolfangel.

And for some damn fine history writing: Chapati Mystery; Mode for Caleb; Rhine River

Some people are doing lists of their (own) favourite posts of the year. Maybe I’ll do that later. Right now I feel the urge to post some pictures of food again. (Because it’s Friday! And it’s Frivolous! Enough of seriousness for this week!)

(From Rob, who expressed a particular interest in “saucy anecdotes about what Rabelais did in his spare time”. Not sure if I can deliver that, but here you are anyway…)

Life stories, books and links
Wikipedia biography
Short biography (Catholic Encyclopaedia)
Another biography (and another)
Francois Rabelais (French)
Rabelais (French)
Les grands auteurs francais du Moyen-Age
Biography, texts

Bibliography
Rabelais and Montaigne bibliography
Grotesque bibliography
Bakhtin bibliography

Excerpts from Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his world
Bakhtin and his world
Rabelais’ carnivalesque
On Pantagruelism
The carnival model
Stephen Greenblatt on Rabelais and carnival
Rabelais’ language
Rabelais et la renaissance
Natalie Zemon Davis on Rabelais and his critics
Bruegel, ‘Battle of Carnival and Lent’
Rabelais and… cannabis (?!)

Wikipedia outline of Gargantua and Pantagruel
Gargantua and Pantagruel (English) (scroll down slightly for the list)
Pantagruel (French)
Letter from Gargantua to Pantagruel

Rabelais quotes

Obviously, I don’t use Blogger here any more. But those of you who do and who are fed up with the Blogger comments system or Haloscan’s limitations (unless you pay), might like this hack that Caleb found. It gives you a comment form right on the comments page without having to go through all the signing in faff. (Or commenting anonymously and then forgetting to leave your name…) The instructions for installing the code seem quite straightforward. It even seems to have a built in anti-spam device (you have to give a confirmation that you want to send the comment).

I don’t think you can use it if you want to allow only people who are registered with Blogger to leave comments though.

PS: the same site has a recent comments hack for Blogger users too…

Via Thanks for not being a zombie, from word’s end:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

So, the book next to me is Garthine Walker, Crime, gender and social order in early modern England (Cambridge, 2003).

“Other manslaughters which were aggravated by the nature of the assaults similarly resulted in a death sentence being passed by the judge: one dark evening, Raphe Lingard used such force that his dagger was embedded in six inches of his victim’s flesh; Robert Wade inflicted mortal wounds on Thomas Baker’s belly and testicles at one o’clock on an October morning.”

Not everything I read is this gruesome, you know. Honest.

People like my link posts, yes? I am the early modern link monster, no?

So if you have any special requests, let me know. Obscure people, famous people, topics you want to know more about, try me. I have years of practice (Google = Primary Alternative to Writing Thesis). I’ll see what I can do in the week or so left before I take a break for Christmas.

From the STAR project, via H-Atlantic, a list of CFPs/upcoming conferences in topics related to Atlantic and Scottish history.

It includes

‘The Atlantic World of Print in the Age of Franklin’, USA (deadline 1 February 2005)

‘Literature Travels: Literature and Cross-cultural Exchange’, UK (deadline 11 March 2005)

I conned persuaded the nice scientists at Tangled Bank to include my post on dream anatomy. I should write more history of science/medicine here; it’s been a side interest of mine for some time, which I never seem to do much about. Especially now I have those splendid links to the Wellcome Trust and National Library of Medicine image archives.

Anyway, go and visit Tangled Bank #18.

It includes great pieces on the maps in your brain; fish gills and pharyngeal arches; a doctor’s failure to practise safe Christmas decorations; and more that I haven’t had time to look at yet.

I learn from Natalie that today is the anniversary of Aphra Behn’s baptism in 1640. (No! I will not be pedantic and ask which calendar!) So, a few links to celebrate with:

The Aphra Behn Page
The Aphra Behn Society
Short biography (another)
Bibliography
A memoir of Aphra Behn

Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave
Bibliography on Oroonoko
Shifting power in Oroonoko
Credibility and realism in Moll Flanders and Oroonoko
Rhetorics of representation in Oroonoko

The Rover (more at Adelaide)
Game of Love (The Rover)

Selected poetry (more poems) (lots of poems!)

The City Heiress (more at Virginia)

The Lady’s Looking Glass.. or the Whole Art of Charming (more at Emory Women Writers Project)

The World of London Theatre 1660-1800
Theatre history on the Web
Restoration Print Culture
Behn and racism
Slavery and the slave trade in Britain

Invitation to a Funeral Tour

And why not finish up with her own words?

To the Fair Clarinda

Fair lovely Maid, or if that Title be
Too weak, too Feminine for Nobler thee,
Permit a Name that more Approaches Truth:
And let me call thee, Lovely Charming Youth.
This last will justifie my soft complaint,
While that may serve to lessen my constraint;
And without Blushes I the Youth persue,
When so much beauteous Woman is in view.
Against thy Charms we struggle but in vain
With thy deluding Form thou giv’st us pain,
While the bright Nymph betrays us to the Swain.
In pity to our Sex sure thou wer’t sent,
That we might Love, and yet be Innocent:
For sure no Crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we shou’d – thy Form excuses it.
For who, that gathers fairest Flowers believes
A Snake lies hid beneath the Fragrant Leaves.

Though beauteous Wonder of a different kind,
Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis join’d;
When e’er the Manly part of thee, wou’d plead
Though tempts us with the Image of the Maid,
While we the noblest Passions do extend
The Love to Hermes, Aphrodite the Friend.

News today is that Google will be working with the world’s major libraries, including Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and NY Public Library, to create a massive searchable – and freely available, it’s hoped – digital library (mainly of out-of-copyright books, with excerpts only of more recent texts). And there are similar efforts underway elsewhere. (Backscratch: scribblingwoman. PS: it was at Cliopatria too. Knew I’d seen it somewhere else. Dunno if I want to scratch Ralph’s back though. He might get the wrong idea.)

Incidentally, I forgot to post the other day about Google Suggest. Probably a bit late now, but there might still be folks who haven’t found it yet. Great for self-googling (wow! since I last looked, I got to Google.com #1! Without even needing quote marks! Well, bugger me).

Oh, and for the foodies among us, Belle has discovered a splendid Google hack, Cooking with Google. Type in your ingredients, and it gives you a bunch of recipes. As I often have strange assortments of leftovers in the fridge, this could prove very useful.

I briefly mentioned detrimental postulation in the wee hours of this morning (when I should probably have been going to bed instead; couldn’t even get the link right to start with).

Its owner Rob and his mate Andrew are keen to foster a blog community with a particular focus on the humanities (and social sciences too). They’re looking for collaborators:

Today we put up an appeal/offer:

the ifanything.org empire is considering donating territory in the form of webspace and bandwidth to any persons or projects who can prove their deservedness. get in touch.

We wanna do something useful with the webspace, which would be interesting or just a plain mess, so send your ideas/suggestions. Nevertheless, I also have some personal comments to add.

Basically, if you’re in the London area (or not!), and you are interested in what are broadly-speaking the main foci of this blog–namely, geeky things, theory things, other academic things–please let me know. I think we could sort out something to do that would be worthwhile, or just completely shit but distracting. It could be done via the net or via print or whatever. I’m particularly interested in humanities things because, despite some major advances, the internet suffers a serious dearth of humanities-type things unlike for computer science, lifestyle mags, et al. You don’t even need ideas, just let me know you’re out there!

Also, Rob is creating humblogs, a directory for humanities blogs. This could be extremely cool (indeed, it already has some pretty cool entries…), but it will depend on your input.

Check out the British Library’s Collect Britain website. I damned well insist, because this is quite stunning. And it’s not just about British history, either.

Someone I know might be interested in the Durham: Echoes of Power virtual exhibit, which is about the medieval Palatinate of Durham and its prince-bishops and their architectural legacy.

There is also the Lost Gardens ‘themed tour’, with manuscript and printed images of gardens real and imagined, plants (neat tests of your herb knowledge and where plants found in Britain originated from), a section on John Evelyn, and considerably more. Absolutely beautiful.

Selected collections include Victorian popular music; Svadesh Videsh (a “fascinating survey of the landscape and architectural heritage of South Asia [which] spans the late-18th to mid-20th centuries”); Caribbean Views, plantation life during the 18th and 19th centuries; and images from the Illuminated Manuscripts collections. (There’s a lot of items in these collections, and the browse facility is not terribly convenient, but there is a search engine; the advanced search gives a good range of options.)

The only difficulty is deciding what to visit first…

Plus, you can register (for free) for ‘personalised’ services including personal folders to store interesting items, and email newsletters.

Yeah, I thought it’d just be a bit o’ fun to get the link to TTLB’s ecosystem. (See the sidebar.)

But it’s not just a bit o’ fun, it’s not. You find yourself going around comparing your rating to your blogging neighbours’; you cackle at finding they’re lower than you in the scheme of things; the green-eyed monster taps at your shoulder when they’re above you.

This is not good.

I have a very promising looking new blog for the blogroll, anyway: Rob’s detrimental postulation. He seems a Very Nice Person, too.

…………

And on the other hand… it is interesting to see who’s linking to you. (scribblingwoman and I would appear to have some kind of mutual back scratch policy that we didn’t even know about) Of course, I can go and do that at Technorati too, but as a commenter said, Technorati doesn’t have cute animal categories…